China’s CVD Diamond Boom AI, Chips & Data Centers | Wenjia Dong, VP, Navi Material-c

Marty Hurwitz: Why don’t you give us a general overview of Navi Material, your work there, and the areas you specialize in?

Wenjia Dong: Yeah. Hi, Marty. It’s an honor to be here and tell everyone about Navi Material. Navi Material is a technology-focused supplier specializing in synthetic diamonds. We provide a wide range of high-performance materials for industrial applications.

We’re not a regular diamond seller; we provide customized diamond solutions for our clients. Because most of our clients work in semiconductor, optical, and thermal applications, they have specific demands and precise requirements. So we provide them with consistency, precision, and long-term technical support.

That’s our goal. As you know, Marty, we also have a very strong supply chain in China, which is home to the world’s largest diamond-manufacturing ecosystem. Our biggest advantage is that we not only produce diamond ourselves, but also have broad access to manufacturing resources, production capacity, and technical expertise. This allows us to offer our clients a wide range of solutions to their problems.

So I believe that is the advantage of Navi Material. Navi Material brings these two worlds—the world of demand and the world of supply—closer together.

Marty Hurwitz: Your supply chain is very strong and varied, which is significant because right now we’re finding at LattiSpec that demand for technology-grade grown diamond across a range of industries is quite strong, and there are not many technically enabled companies like yours that can meet that demand.

The requests for products and the variety of products are—

Wenjia Dong: Mm-hmm.

Marty Hurwitz: —dramatic.

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Marty Hurwitz: Can you give us some examples, without revealing any customer secrets, of the end users, what they’re using your products for, and the types of businesses involved?

Wenjia Dong: Yeah, that’s a great question, Marty. We have a variety of customers, and they come from different areas with different applications. We cannot serve them with a single type, or even a couple of types, of diamond products. We have to be able to customize and personalize products to fulfill their needs.

So, in that sense, we offer micron diamond, nanodiamond, engineered agglomerated diamond, and spherical diamond. These are all customized diamond products, and we can further personalize the diamond itself. The most popular products recently have been CVD diamond products.

We have an entire supply chain that is able to customize the products themselves. And now, Marty, you know we’ve been working on this for a while. We have the capacity to supply not only Europe, but also the U.S. and many other countries where our clients are based. Those clients primarily use the products for thermal conductivity, polishing, and grinding in semiconductor and thermal-management applications, as well as high-grade optical applications in aerospace and high-power laser technology.

Marty Hurwitz: That’s about what’s happening: a wide range of requests are coming in from different companies and industry sectors. Very often, the product developer—I’m sure you’ve experienced this—knows they have a pain point, a problem they need to solve, and thinks diamond can solve it.

But very often, they don’t know what they should be asking for in terms of the diamond product. So they depend on you to guide them through the possibilities and identify the type of diamond material they should consider. Have you found that to be the case?

Wenjia Dong: Yeah, Marty, that’s definitely the case.

I mean, diamond is one of the best materials in the world because of its resistance, thermal conductivity, and many other properties that make it one of the world’s most unique materials. Many industries have not yet realized its potential because they have not considered using diamond.

We often hear people ask, “Can we use diamond, and how do we use it?” That’s where we come in. We introduce the properties of diamond and turn theoretical properties into real-world cases. We bring lab experiments to life so they fit into our clients’ work and production. That may be difficult in some cases, but through gradual testing, new methods, and teamwork, I believe it will become more common in the future.

That will be the future of the industry, not only in semiconductors, but also in thermal and optical applications. Diamond will be one of the most important materials of the future.

Marty Hurwitz: You know, this is fascinating to me because, for years, on the gem side of diamond material, China was known primarily for HPHT production.

But it sounds like the industry in China is evolving very rapidly and in a very big way. A lot of capital is flowing into the technology-diamond growth sector, a lot of CVD growth is happening now, and there is a great deal of technical expertise in diamond growth related to specific electronics, medical applications, and a whole range of fields.

Tell us a little about your background, your family’s background, and the Chinese diamond-growing industry, particularly as it relates to technology applications. It sounds like massive growth is happening right now. Can you tell us a little about that?

Wenjia Dong: Yeah, Marty, you’re totally correct.

Right now in China, during the last month or two, I’ve been traveling to many companies that manufacture CVD diamonds—about 10 or 20 companies. They’re all CVD growers, and they’re all trying to expand their capacity because there is huge demand for CVD diamond in thermal-conductivity and optical applications, as well as in traditional mechanical applications.

I was born here in the center of China’s diamond-producing region, in Henan Province. I believe you know that this province produces a huge amount of diamond—approximately 70% to 80% of China’s diamond output—and most of it is exported around the world. I was born here, and when I was growing up, many of my neighbors were diamond manufacturers. That gives us a strong advantage in this business because we have access to a wide range of suppliers and experts throughout the ecosystem.

During my visits over the last month, I have seen that everyone is trying to expand diamond manufacturing, not only in quantity, but also by decreasing costs. They are moving factories to western China, which has much cheaper electricity. Electricity accounts for 40% to 50% of their operating costs and, therefore, a significant share of the diamond’s cost.

So right now, they are trying to decrease costs to make diamond more accessible to more companies. They are also researching additional diamond applications. For example, they produce polycrystalline diamond for thermal-conductivity applications. They attach thermal CVD diamond to different materials to test its performance with those materials, which is what one of my friends is doing.

They are also trying to use these materials in data-center applications, which we believe will be a huge market in the future. It is very popular now in China and the U.S. because of the AI boom. So I believe there is a major trend in China toward developing more affordable CVD diamonds and more advanced technology diamonds for integration into AI and other industries.